Pressed into place

The weakness of Bush as a candidate and the antipathy from the traditional US media made the result close. Bush was saved by the vibrancy and diversity of the internet, talk radio and cable news, writes US blogger Glenn Reynolds.

As I write this, it's all over bar the shouting, though the shouting may go on for a while. Kerry supporter Andrew Sullivan writes:

"IT'S OVER: President Bush is narrowly re-elected. It was a wild day with the biggest black eyes for exit pollsters. I wanted Kerry to win. I believed he'd be more able to unite the country at home, more fiscally conservative, more socially inclusive, and better able to rally the world in a more focused war on terror. I still do. But a slim majority of Americans disagreed. And I'm a big believer in the deep wisdom of the American people. They voted in huge numbers, and they made a judgment."

Blogger Stephen Green, noting that this time it's a Republican with a majority in the popular vote as well as the electoral college, observes: "Bush has obviously won the popular vote. If he was 'selected not elected' in 2000, then why on Earth would the Dems want to try to put Kerry in via lawsuits in 2004?"

I think that's right. But although Bush's majority of 3.5m votes may not be quite as slim as Sullivan makes it sound, it's a lot slimmer than it ought to be for a wartime incumbent presiding over a booming economy. There are two reasons for that.

One is that Bush was a weak candidate, something that I've been pointing out to enthusiastic Bush supporters since 2002. Bush can deliver an adequate prepared speech, but he's not much of an orator even compared to the leaden and windy Kerry. Many people find his religious faith off-putting, and as Harvard professor Bill Stuntz noted yesterday, he's done a bad job explaining the war:

"Over the course of the last eighteen months, George W Bush has done a terrible job of explaining the war in Iraq, of spelling out the strategic choices, the relevant risks, and the consequences of victory or defeat."

I think that's right too, and one need only contrast Bush's utterances on the subject - and lack thereof - to Tony Blair's to see the difference. (I suspect, actually, that Blair could have beaten both Bush and Kerry if he'd been able to run in the United States).

I also suspect that a bigger reason for the slimness of Bush's lead has to do with the traditional American media's role as an increasingly open arm of the Democratic party. Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek magazine, famously observed that the media "wants Kerry to win", and speculated that this support from the press would be worth fifteen points at election time. Thomas later backed off this and speculated that press support for Kerry might be worth a mere five points, but even that is enough to explain why there's still shouting going on, instead of a clear victory for Bush.

The good news is that the traditional press's influence is shrinking, because people have caught on:

"Two polls released last week found that more people perceive the media tilting coverage in favour of Kerry than Bush. Gallup determined that 35% think coverage has tilted toward Kerry compared to just 16% who said it favoured Bush. The Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press discovered that "half of voters say most newspaper and TV reporters would prefer to see John Kerry win the election, compared with just 22% who think that most journalists are pulling for George Bush."

Thanks to the internet, cable news channels and talk radio, media bias is easier to spot and easier for people to bypass. This not only changes views, but prevents the formation of a phoney consensus - what experts call "preference falsification" - resulting from widespread, and unified, media bias.

Those of you across the Atlantic may wish to take a lesson from this. As the BBC's atrocious handling of the Gilligan affair - and, indeed, its war coverage generally - illustrates, media bias is hardly limited to the United States. In fact, it's probably stronger elsewhere, and less noted, because there are fewer alternatives. Most countries have nothing like American-style talk radio, for example, because it poses far too great a threat to elites to be permitted. Still, British blogs like Samizdata, Biased BBC, Harry's Place and Normblog are providing alternative voices. Since I don't think that elite media have done a very good job during the decades of their dominance, I look forward to seeing alternative media make a difference around the world.

· Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, runs the instapundit US political blog